Unit 6 the Marginalised Voice

UNIT 6 THE MARGINALISED VOICE Structure Objectives Women's Writing Rosemary Dobson Cock Crow The Aboriginal Voice Kath Walker We Are Going Let Us Sum Up Questions Glossary 6.0 OBJECTIVES In this unit we will talk about the literature of two marginalised sections of society - women and the Aborigines of Australia Women have been deified or demonised at will, neither extreme according them the status and dignity of human existence. Although they constitute one half of humanity, their thoughts, &lings, aspirations and wishes have been routinely ignored. Now, @ey are coming into their own, their i~errnostconcepts, perceptions and experiences of being women, finding expression in am increasingly large number of works by women. The Aborigines of Australia too, having been dispossessed of the land of their forefhthers and denied basic human rights, are finally voicing their concerns and hurt, and their anguish over the passing away of an entire way of lik. Rosemary Dobson's poem speaks of the inner life of a woman while Kath Walker's delineates the collapse of the Aboriginal modes of living. 6.1 WOMEN'S WRITING Women's writing has a pertinence and force fbr a variety of reasons. While projecting the observations, situations, responses and struggles ofthe female half of humanity, it also reflects a consciousness created by gender, the entity traditionally defined by the frameworks of kinship, marriage and procreation. At another level it questions values and constructs considered self-evident so h. It focuses attention on the d&nition of Womand creativity and raises a number of queries related to oppression and colonisation It has helped both to put together and express the idea of the female self as well as to dismantle the concept of the all-pervasive male figure. Working through revolutionary movements as well as silent changes, through legal, political battles and by breaching psychological barriers, women are beginning to know and discover themselves. All women's writing is not feminist and, even when gender identification overrides cultural barriers, certain cultural concepts also define and differentiate feminist positions. Feminist interp-tions, however, can flow out even through absence and denial and are not necessarily dependent on equivalence and identification. Many women writers are wary of their feminist affiliations even today for fear of being Mermarginalised as the feminist is not juxtaposed with the masculine but is regarded as a sub-culture and the voice and class of the victim uld the oppressed, thrust upon it. ~~d~~~ ~~~~~~li~~Feminism begins with the self - and not essentially the intellectual self. Most PO&,.,,(1901-1970) cultures define women's roles through their bodily behaviour, and their reproductive functions. Most sodieties have their own versions of conduct books for women, the majority of which have been written by men. Women's writing is occupied in changing the terms of these definitions, moving through individualism and analysis of the self toward assurance and confidence. It has projected different patterns and interpretations in lieu of the existing ones and attempted to crumble contrarieties. Men need, love and desire women but they do so in relation to their own selves. The desires and aspects of a woman's life which is not connected to their needs, does not usually interest them. Women's writing has learnt to express the untold narrative of being a woman through struggling against an internalisation of role models thrust upon them. It focuses attmtion on both the representation of a female sensibility, a feminine reality, and on its significance as a means of bringing about an awareness of this reality. Women's writing has been slow to find recognition, for several reasons. There were not enough women writers and not enough access to education to make their writing possible; history has neglected and drowned their contribution and their work has been disregarded as being involved with a limited world of experience since they were limited to domesticity. Their writing has been dismissed as inconsequential on the grounds that, according to religious and political thought, they held a subordinate position and were labelled as less rational and intellectual than men. Freedom is the first requirement for any type of creative endeavour for taboos, inhibitions and sets of controls fetter the pursuit of experience. Yet, women have been denied the fieedom to move, breathe and meet people fieely over centuries and confined to kitchens or behind the purdah and deprived of the openness and bhness of experience outside the domestic prison. Child-marriages, child- bearing and child-rearing were the other chains that prevented the woman's imagination fiom soaring and finding expression. They have been creatures split into two - the physical and the intellectual selves - with the latter having been largely left undeveloped due to the demands of society and fhily. While on the one hand women have been placed outside culture and history, on the other, they have been projected as the guardians of culture, expected to preserve and continue it through procreation and an adherence to tradition and rituals. Women's writing has questioned patriarchal concepts relating to their education, marriage and fhmily. There has been a tremendous amount of work done in the last three decades - the result of the &orts of hundreds of women across continents and cultures who have resisted domination. The accessibility to education, right to economic'independence, to vote and to inherit property have been the focus of socio-political struggles. While gender differences are acknowledged, they are not regarded as making women inferior in any way. TKhas led to an introspective analysis of the female self and the right to pride and dignity within it. In a sense, women's writing is the literature of silence for its meaning lies enveloped and disguised, preferring the subtle means of communication to the more overt ones. It also qualifies for this nomenclature for it seeks to express what has been eff$ced and suppressed and blanketed in the muffling cloak of silence for so long. 6.2 ROSEMARY DOBSON Rosemary Dobson (1 920-1 985), taught art, was involved with cipher work during World War I1 and was also in the publishing business. She has edited a feminist anthology, Sister Poets (1 979). Her training in art manifests itself in poems on painters, painting and design. Hm is a detached, reflective writing, characterised The Margidised by dsmanship and formal elegance. voice .' The Ship of Ice (1 948) illustrates the timelessness of art and its power to immortalise the fleeting moment. Her later poetry is concerned with personal expression -specially motherhood - and Greek themes. Due to her training in art, her poetry gains a quality of stillness akin to the paintings of the Dutch Masters. The words of her poetry select and arrange images from an experience. The poems record the surhx details that survive in memory or history or art, but in reading their careful relations, we reconstruct the passions and endurance, the despair and the agony that lie behind the surhce. Each poem comes, to use one of her titles, like 'The Message in the Bottle' to the reader who can .. recognise in what I say the voice that speaks to me alone and he the predetermined, he the listener, finder, watcher of the wrack that's washed in hmthe sea The messages in her bottles speak of love, poetry and oblivion. Love is the force in her work which transcends and redeems the individual; poetry, the art with which she makes sense of life; and oblivion, which is not only death but the unknowingness against which poetry and all the arts speak. The images in her poetry are drawn hmthe commonplaces of life. From those simple forms, we build, in our minds, the patterns that constitute the miracle of life itself. Although she takes the whole of time as her province, this makes her no less contemporary or Australian. She argues that 'every artist should have complete freedom of choice in his(her) ideas. It should not matter if (s)he ranges back in time provided .. .(s)he tries to use the equipment of thought and technique that is available to him(her) in his(her) own time with which to shape his(her) work.' Her poetry belongs to our time, with its emphasis on both the power and the inadequacies of the human mind, on the recovery and analysis lather than on a direct re-creation of experience and expression of emotion. We are aware, always, ofthe distance between observer and action, word and reality, in a world where mind and observation are the only realities. She writes as one who delights in the ambiguity of the detachment of art being not I only an alternative to life but an essential part of it, revealing at once, the wonder and fragility of the world. The wonder is humanity itself, which invests the world with the love, art, ceremony and science that fills her poems. There is also the realisation, however, that humanity, which realism the wonder of the world, also threatens it. \ 6.3 COCKCROW Please read the poem and answer the questions that follow so that you can I understand it better. I I a) What does the title suggest to you? b) What does the poet mean when she says at the end that she knew the meaning of what the cock was saying? c) Do you think 'three' has a special significance in this poem? What are the reasons for your opinion? ~e~~~~~li~~ Discussion Poetry f1901-1970) The poem gives expression to a woman's wish to be himelt; fit4of all social roles of mother, daughter, wife etc.

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